Imaginaries of Power
Research project Matthias Glaubrecht
within the framework of the DFG Collaborative Research Group "Imaginaries of Power", 2018 - 2022
On the Disciplingenesis of Ecology
In the natural sciences, notions of force - understood as a cause that brings about change - by no means only permeate physics, but have also gradually gained a stronger contour in natural history as influencing variables or evolutionary factors that determine form, diversity and distribution.
Biology as an autonomous science - i.e. one whose fundamentals cannot be reduced to physics, for example - has recently been emphasised and argumentatively underpinned on several occasions. Under the premise of presenting consistent guidelines, essential forces for biology can be characterised in several ways.
To clarify the changing ideas on the effect of natural forces in the context of biodiversity, a synergistic view of ecology in particular from the perspective of evolution suggests itself. Although ecology is classically understood as the study of the household of nature, it is a central biological discipline whose basic conceptual idea of effective environmental forces that create equilibrium needs to be studied in more detail. Ideas of a dynamic equilibrium, of a state that is always newly established and as if by itself, run through natural history research in the field of the discipline that was only called ecology much later; however, so far no systematic investigation has probed and analysed the respective perception of those forces of nature that could underlie the establishment of such an equilibrium.
The aim of the project is to approach an evaluation of ideas on the changing answers to the question of the forces, factors and mechanisms of biological diversity (biodiversity)